They had a virtual meeting with the Biden people and got positive feedback ….
In fact?
The President AND Vice President will be traveling to Georgia to showcase a push by the admin to get some sort of Voter Registration/Reform to counter Republican voter suppression efforts….
BEHIND THE SCENES — A day before President JOE BIDEN made his fiery Jan. 6 speech centering on the threat to democracy and importance of voting rights, the White House held a virtual meeting with civil rights leaders. Each side came with a goal in mind.
— The White House’s goal: Provide an update on the push for federal voting rights legislation.
— The civil rights leaders’ goal: Make clear to Biden’s aides that the president needed to get “more serious” on the issue, that what they’ve done so far wasn’t good enough, and that time is running out, according to two people who attended the meeting.
The civil rights leaders were in for a pleasant surprise.
“There was no pushback” from the administration, one person who attended the meeting told Playbook, describing the consensus view as: “We are at this place. We have no runway left. We gotta get this done.”
To attendees, it felt like an admission that the White House has entered a new phase in its advocacy of voting rights — a reality underlined by aides’ announcement that Biden and VP KAMALA HARRIS will head to Georgia next week to speak about the topic.
The civil rights leaders left the meeting cautiously optimistic, and have been bullish about the changes they’ve seen since — especially that passionate speech from the Capitol on Thursday, which House Majority Whip JIM CLYBURN (D-S.C.) heralded as a “turning point” in Biden’s presidency.
Rev. WILLIAM BARBER, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, says the White House needs to take that show on the road, and hopes “the president and the vice president will go to Georgia, then decide, ‘we need to hop this plane right over to West Virginia, right over to Alabama, right down to Texas.’”
White House aides say that Georgia was selected as a launchpad for both practical and symbolic reasons.
— The practical: Biden’s team sees Georgia as ground zero for the state-level voter-restriction efforts that Dems’ federal legislation is meant to combat. It also has several marquee statewide races on a ballot this year, including Sen. RAPHAEL WARNOCK’s reelection bid and STACEY ABRAMS’ campaign against Republican Gov. BRIAN KEMP.
— The symbolic: Biden has a Senate majority right now only because Democrats prevailed in both Georgia runoff elections on Jan. 5, 2021, electing Warnock and Sen. JON OSSOFF. But deeper than that, the fight for voting rights is woven into the state’s history: It was the longtime home of former Rep. JOHN LEWIS, whose namesake voting rights legislation is moldering in the Senate….
image…Los Angles Magazine